religious and ethical abstrusities for which they care little and of which they understand less. Such might be called the pathology of the genus financier, not only in America, but everywhere. In regard to our American specimens it is more or less anachronistic to speak of them as purely American in character, although, in a way, they are. The organizing and financial type of mind--American, European or any other--is really little different from that of all preceding countries and ages. Yet financial manipulation, in the extended modern sense, is comparatively new. It dates from the industrial revolution in England in the eighteenth century. There was a time when the organizing type of mind, comparable to our modern examples, was engaged in other things: money-lending and exchange principally. The machinery for finance in the modern sense was lacking. You might have found a J. P. Morgan, a J. D. Rockefeller, or a Russell Sage as Keeper of the Exchequer and Supervisor of the Grain Stores of, say, Egypt or Assyria, or Adviser to the King, whether he ruled in Babylon, Persia or elsewhere. One cannot help thinking what an excellent type of Keeper of the Exchequer, Vizier or High Priest our own John D. Rockefeller would have made. The robes! The sanctity! As we come forward in history to the end of the Roman Empire and the beginning of that mental darkness known as the Middle Ages, when all intelligence, financial and other, seems to have been completely swept away, we find the purely financial and organizing type but slowly developing. Joseph (he of the coat of many colors), fabled Crœsus, who ruled in Asia Minor, and Lepidus and Mæcenas, friends of triumvirs, emperors and poets, are excellent examples of the ancient financial type. Their like is not to be found until after the revival of banking and trade in the fifteenth century. And if you look back you will see that to-day, in another way, we have been repeating in Wall Street (or were until a few years ago), the type of man who occasionally sat as Emperor over all the Romans. If you are inclined to doubt this you might, if the opportunity offered, examine the collection of portrait busts of Roman Emperors of the highly executive and financial type (Hadrian, Trajanus, Titus, Caracalla and the rest) in the Vatican, the Musee del la Terme and the British Museum. Hadrian, for instance, was as much like the late Commodore Vanderbilt, side whiskers and all, as one man might be to another; and Trajanus greatly resembled the late Mark Hanna, whose name somehow suggests that of a Roman. Any one of ten or fifteen portrait busts of ancient Roman Emperors might almost be mistaken for Armour, Morgan, Gould, Sage, Crocker, Stanford, Hearst. For example, compare Russell Sage to Julius Cæsar; or Wm. H. Vanderbilt to Augustus Cæsar. Indeed, if you were to examine some of the major operations of the successful Roman Emperors you would find that their